Wednesday, September 5, 2012

The Two Castros

There were two Castros who came to prominence during the
50’s and 60’s. Fidel, the leader of Cuba, was the most prominent and then there
was Bernadette, the daughter of the founder of Castro Convertibles who
became famous for a television ad, where she demonstrated the facility with which
a four year old child could open a legendary sofa bed. Now Bernadette,
according to a recent Times story
(“The Girl From Castro Convertibles’ Early Commercials Is Back," NYT,
6/11/12), is creating a line of “pullout ottomans” that she is advertising on
the Home Shopping Network. The Castro convertible did not overturn a
dictatorship or result in the Bay of Pig fiasco, but it was revolutionary in
its own way, to the extent that it represented the beginnings of the DYI lifestyle that was also epitomized in a less domestic setting by Hugh Hefner’s Playboy lifestyle. The Castro convertible brought a little elegance into
otherwise cramped quarters. Those living in a one room studio suddenly had a
living room. Those with a living room now found a way to turn their bedroom
into a den and it was in these new living quarters, sitting on a Castro that
had been folded into its sofa mode, that many Americans first saw images of
Fidel Castro with his legendary cigar on the small screened televisions that
were ubiquitous in the era.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.